* Peter Bowyer wrote (03/05/07 06:02):
> On 03/05/07, Kjetil Torgrim Homme <kjetilho@???> wrote:
>> On Sun, 2007-04-29 at 17:02 +0200, Magnus Holmgren wrote:
>>> On Sunday 22 April 2007 22:23, Jeremy Harris wrote:
>>>> The docs link on exim.org still gives a 4.66 doc?
>>> I've updated the webpages now. If I missed anything, please speak out.
>> PLEASE make the URL to the Exim documentation stable. every time a new
>> version comes out, the Google page rank is reset. in addition, nobody
>> links to the documentation since the URLs will die within a year or so
>> anyway. the end result is that a Google search will send people to list
>> archives or shoddy howtos, and *never* the official documentation.
>
> Whilst I agree with the principle, this is harder than you're
> implying. The internal structure of the doc tree changes (if only
> slightly) with each release, so it's not possible to have a persistent
> URL for every sub-page - and when chapter numbers change, this
> amplifies the problem. I think a bit of a redesign would help, though
> - but remember that the web docs are generated with a toolchain which
> also produces the other formats so it's not necessarily simple.
>
> Judicious use of Google sitemaps would be be a good thing, too.
>
>> as an example, I just searched for "isip exim". I got 512 hits, but at
>> 156 Google said the rest were elided since they were similar to what I'd
>> already seen. not *one* of these hits were at exim.org. the closest I
>> got was a mirror: <http://exim.feraudet.com/exim-pdf-4.66/doc/spec.pdf>.
>> this was hit #15.
>
> But the old versions of the docs are not removed, so those should
> still hit - I wonder why they don't?
>
>> trying to emulate a slightly more savvy user, I tried the search "isip
>> site:exim.org". you'll get the list archive almost exclusively. first
>> hit outside the archive is a reference to the documentation to 4.30 at
>> hit #49. the two hits for 4.66 documentation come VERY LAST!
>> obviously, 4.67 documentation can't be found yet at all.
>
> This is certainly an indexing issue - again, sitemaps would do the trick.
>
>> this not clearly helping the situation with newbie users not reading or
>> even finding the documentation, and the fix is simple. please do it.
>
> As I said, it's not quite as simple as you're suggesting. But it's
> probably worth some effort, I agree.
I agree too. I remember this coming up a while ago (OK, I brought it
up). A certain P Bowyer came up with some good suggestions.
http://www.exim.org/mail-archives/exim-users/Week-of-Mon-20060522/msg00026.html
Chris
